by Sloan Wilson
“Molly, aren’t you hungry?” Sylvia asked.
“Oh yes, I’m going to eat,” Molly replied. Eating was extremely difficult, but she felt it necessary to give the impression that she was feeling perfectly well. John was looking at her worriedly, and she smiled timorously at him.
After dinner she went to her room, saying she wanted to read. Her head throbbed; there was a feeling that the top of it was going to blow off. Holding both hands pressed to her ears, she threw herself down on her bed. That night she had dreams which she did not remember upon awaking, but which made her flail her arms, knocking over a lamp on the bedside table, causing her father to rush in crying, “What’s the matter?”
With scared eyes she blinked at the big man in the blue bathrobe at the foot of her bed. “I guess I must have had a nightmare,” she said.
In the morning Molly arose with a profound sense of disaster. After forcing down her breakfast, she put on her bathing suit, went to the beach and sat huddled on the sand, a forlorn and dejected figure in the bright morning sun.
John soon appeared in swimming trunks, buoyant and self-confident, and threw himself down beside her in the sand, a young athlete astride the world. He took her hand and touched her wrist, a gesture of infinite tenderness, and he said, “I hope you’re feeling better.”
“We can’t hold hands here,” she said. “Someone might see.”
“Is there a law against it?”
“Johnny! It’s not good taste!”
“All right,” he said, and let her hand go.
An old man in short trousers who was walking without shoes at the water’s edge looked at them curiously.
“Let’s get out of here, Johnny,” Molly said. “Let’s take a walk.”
Striding along the beach, John asked her about her school, and she described it, finding him easy to talk to, but oddly enough, their new ease of communication did not include her fear, her terror, her guilt—that was a dark island within her, unapproachable even to him.
Two old women with big straw hats were casting from the beach into the inlet. Wearing faded cotton dresses almost to their ankles, they shouted gaily to each other, and ran up and down the beach whooping with glee like children whenever one of them caught a fish. To escape their curious stares Molly led the way to the secret place in the dunes, and almost immediately John kissed her, pulling her tight against him.
“No!” she said desperately.
He stopped immediately, taken aback. “Why?”
“Because I’m still afraid.” That, the understatement of the year.
“Of having a baby?”
“Yes. That and other things I can’t explain.”
If you did find out you were going to have one, we could get married right away.”
“No!” she said.
“Wouldn’t you like to get married?”
“No. Not now. Not that way.”
“I know you’re right, and that we should be sensible and wait and all that,” John said in a monotone.
“Yes,” she said with great earnestness. “We’ve got to be good.”
“I don’t know what it means to be good,” he said miserably.
“Are you bad, Johnny?” she asked, shocked. “Do you do this with other girls?”
“No,” he said. “I just don’t know what the word means, the word ‘good.’ Will it be ‘good’ to see each other hardly at all for the next four or five years? Is loneliness ‘good’?”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said.
“I think your shoulders are good,” he said. “I give these tendons in your foot a mark of excellent.”
“No, Johnny! Please!”
“Can’t I even hold your hand?”
“Of course, but you don’t stop.”
“I just want to hold your hand,” he said.
The wind rustled the grass on the dunes, making the palmetto leaves whisper, and she started suddenly, believing someone was there. It would be bad to be seen in such a secluded spot, she thought, even if they were only holding hands. Behind the sandbanks anyone might be lurking—small boys, vagrants, bird watchers, Peeping Toms, her father taking a morning walk. The shadows on the sand, even the clouds in the sky, seemed full of scowling faces with eyes. She sat rigid with fear, and she said, “Johnny, we shouldn’t be seen here. Let’s take a walk.”
“All right,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”
“How about a swim?”
“I hate swimming,” he said. “The water looks cold.”
“I’m asking you to go swimming with me. Then you’re coming home with me and you’re going to chat with Dad and your mother. It’s important that we be very normal.”
“Sure,” he said.
“How would you like to rent some bicycles? I haven’t ridden a bike in ages.”
“That would be fun,” he said, brightening.
“Let’s go,” she said. “I’ll race you into the water.”
In a blur of motion she was off in front of him, her feet kicking up a spray of sand. Just at the water’s edge he caught up with her, and they plunged into the sea together, emerging from the first comber breathless, but shouting like Indians in battle.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
THROUGHOUT THE VACATION the atmosphere in Ken’s house became more and more tense. Molly’s shyness and reserve increased. She didn’t seem capable of sitting and talking with either Sylvia or Ken, and when they addressed her, she had a habit of averting her eyes. Sylvia became convinced that Molly must have heard such terrible things about Ken and herself that it was torture for the poor child to be polite, as she was obviously trying to be. John played the piano almost every minute he wasn’t off somewhere with Molly, and on the few occasions Sylvia tried to engage him in conversation, he was courteous but evasive. There was a troubled look in his eyes, and in the music he played there was a wild mixture of elation and despair. Molly was obviously the cause of the elation, Sylvia thought; of the despair, she felt herself to be the mother. Her only consolation was that some day both Molly and John would grow old enough to forgive. All children go through a stage of despising their parents, she told herself grimly; divorce just makes matters a little worse.
On the last afternoon of Molly’s vacation John and she sat on the beach in the place the hurricane had made crashing through the dunes, but it was not secret enough. “Anyone could come along,” Molly said.
No place to go.
“Molly,” he said suddenly, “the place where I used to live, the old motel—it’s closed, locked up and for sale.”
“Oh, no, Johnny!” she said. “Not an empty house. The very thought gives me the creeps.”
“No one could find us there.”
“No,” she said.
“I know that place. There’s a loose window in the cellar. I could get in.”
“It scares me just to think about.”
“You keep worrying about people seeing us,” he said. “I thought…”
“Please, Johnny, for the last time, I beg you. No.”
“All right,” he said. “I don’t want to scare you. I keep telling myself that.” He put his hand out and touched her ankle with such infinite longing that she was moved. “Poor Johnny,” she said.
“I know I’m wrong about this,” he said. “Anybody would say so.”
“Don’t worry.”
He stroked her foot. “Did you ever look at a foot?”
“Yes,” she said, laughing.
“I mean, really look at it.”
“Sure.”
“It’s very beautiful. The way it’s made. This arch, like a steel spring. The marvelous things like steel cords just under the skin. It’s a miracle.”
“There are lots of miracles around then,” she said, smiling. “Four right here.”
“Yes,” he said. “I would like to understand more about miracles.”
“Want to be a doctor?”
> “No. I would hate to take a foot apart.” He encircled her ankle with his fingers. “I like it as it is.”
“Kiss me, Johnny.”
“No. I would only end by making myself even more miserable, or scaring you. It’s no good because it’s one-sided. I’ve just realized that.”
“It’s not one-sided!” she said, shocked.
“This part is.”
“Johnny, it’s not that I don’t love you! It’s just that I’m so terribly scared!”
“I know.” He stretched out on his back on the sand, deeply tanned now, and lithe, but curiously in the attitude of a corpse. His eyes were closed against the sun, and his chest seemed hardly to move for breath. He said nothing.
She sat near his head, looking down at him. “I love you, Johnny,” she said.
He smiled without opening his eyes. “That will be good to think about.”
“It’s true.”
“I know it is. I love you back.”
She sat staring down at him, feeling oddly as though she had killed him, the tableau complete, the murderess sitting by her victim’s side. He seemed utterly relaxed, his face serene, the voice friendly, no forced melancholy, but indefinably dead.
“We’ll write often, Johnny,” she said. “Every day.”
“And sometimes twice.”
“I’m sorry Mother won’t let me visit you. Maybe I can make her change her mind.”
“Maybe.”
“Next summer maybe I can talk her into letting me go to Pine Island.”
“That would be wonderful.”
“Mother might change her mind about your visiting me at school, and you could, anyway.”
He rolled over on his side, facing her, and said, “We’ve got to face facts, Molly. Your mother is going to make it just as tough on us as she possibly can. She wants to break us up, and maybe she’ll succeed, at least for a long while.”
“We can stick it out,” Molly said.
“I’ve been lying here trying to imagine what it’s going to be like. With no fooling, Molly. Sunday when I start back to school. My old room. It’s a thing I’m trying to get used to.”
“Me too. I don’t look forward to it, either.”
“I know,” he said.
“We play volley ball every day at three. I hate volley ball.”
He laughed.
“We also play field hockey,” she said. “There is an enormous girl who keeps rushing down on me. I just get out of her way, and it makes the other girls angry.”
“Don’t dispute her,” he said. “I want no broken bones.”
“We have to carry books on our head to learn to stand straight,” she said. “There’s a teacher there by the name of Miss Wriggly. Honest. And she wriggles when she walks, in a kind of horrible way.”
Molly got to her feet, turning, to John’s astonishment, into an expert mimic. “Miss Wriggly says, ‘Now, girls, you must realize how important it is to know how to enter a room. You should pause at the door, and you should imagine that all eyes are upon you. It doesn’t make a bit of difference whether it’s true. You should feel it. You should carry yourself like a queen.’ Then,” Molly concluded, “she comes wiggling in. Like this.”
She gave a convincing demonstration of a stilted, mincing gait.
“Do queens walk like that?” John asked, laughing.
“I never saw one. I don’t think Miss Wriggly has, either.”
“I love the way you walk,” John said. “Don’t let Miss Wriggly change it.”
“She wouldn’t like to hear you say that,” Molly said. “She says, ‘Molly Carter, what am I going to do? You won’t learn how to enter a room and you won’t learn how to sit.’”
“To sit?” John asked in astonishment.
“Yes. We’re supposed to sit like this.” Folding her hands neatly in front of her, Molly sank in a highly circumspect manner to the sand.
“I love the way you sit,” John said. “Don’t let her change it.”
“School’s not going to be so bad after this, Johnny,” she said softly. “Nothing’s going to be so bad. You’ve done me good.”
“Come on,” he said briskly, sitting up. “We’ve got to go back. There’s a dance at the hotel tonight. Want to go?”
“Johnny,” she said, catching him by the hand. “Kiss me once.”
“No!” he said brusquely. “There’s no point in making this any tougher.”
“Is a kiss tough?”
“Oh, Molly. Stopping after one is. I’m trying my best to do what you want.”
“Right now, I want a kiss.”
He gave her one. When it was over she said, “I’ll go with you tonight. Wherever you want.”
“Don’t offer that,” he said bluntly. “I don’t have the strength to refuse.”
“I wouldn’t offer if I wanted you to refuse.”
“Oh, Molly!” he said, pulling her to him and burying his face in her hair. “I don’t want to do awful things to you.”
“They’re not awful things.”
“I don’t want to make you scared.”
“I love you, Johnny,” she said. “Don’t ever forget that.”
“I’m going to ask you to go into the motel first and make sure everything’s all right,” Molly said very reasonably while they were walking back along the beach. “I’ll tell Dad we’re going to the movies. That will give us plenty of time.”
“All right,” John said.
“Down at the Bijou they’re showing King Kong again. I saw that ages ago at school, so if they ask me questions about it, I’ll know the answers.”
“Good,” John said. “Molly, if you don’t want to do this, for God’s sake, don’t.”
“Hush. Have you seen King Kong?”
“No.”
“Well, you better know about it in case they ask you how you liked the movie. It’s a real old one they keep reviving. There’s this big ape, a gorilla or something from a prehistoric age. He carries this girl, Fay Wray, I think it is, off in the palm of his hand.”
“Oh, Molly,” he said. “I’m beginning to feel awful.”
“Why?”
“I’m making you do something you don’t want to do.”
“I never do things I don’t want to do,” she said. “Ask Miss Wriggly.”
“You’re sure about this? All these plans make it so sort of cold-blooded.”
“We have to be practical,” she said. “Now listen about King Kong, because Dad might get suspicious, and he might ask you questions, and Johnny…”
“Yes?”
“Johnny,” she said with dreadful earnestness. “I don’t want to be caught. You said there was a way not to have a baby.”
“Yes.”
“Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“This is horrible,” she said. “Why does it have to be so horrible?”
“I don’t know,” he said in real confusion. “The horrible part—I don’t know.”
“Is it worth it, Johnny?”
“No.” The word sounded false. “It’s not worth it to you,” he added.
“It is to me if it is to you.”
“No, Molly,” he said. “The hell with it. I’ll take you to that dance and tomorrow I’ll get on the train, and that will be that. We’ll write letters.”
“It’s worth it to you,” she said conclusively.
“Yes,” he said. “I can’t lie about it. I don’t know why, but yes. I don’t care much about consequences. I know that sounds horrible. Maybe I’m horrible. I don’t know.”
“All right, Johnny,” she said. “If it’s that important to you, it’s that important to me.”
They continued walking down the beach. “About King Kong,” she said. “In case anybody asks you. In the end, this big gorilla, or whatever it is, climbs the Empire State Building, and these airplanes come and kill him. He bats at them like flies, but they kill him. It’s kind o
f sad.”
“Sounds terrible,” John said.
“If anybody asks you, just talk about the end,” Molly said. “That’s the part that everybody remembers.”
He left her at the house, got a flashlight, and went to reconnoiter the old motel. By that time it was almost dark.
The cellar window of the motel was as loose as he remembered it. He opened it easily, and lowered himself into a small storage room. Pitch blackness. He turned on the flashlight. The room was piled high with terrace furniture covered with dust. He found his way to the stairs, holding his hand over the flashlight so that it could not be seen from outside, the beam making his fingers glow red and Satanic in the dark. The old familiar kitchen, the hall. The little lobby was ghostly with sheet-shrouded furniture, and there was the smell of moth-balls. Then he came to the curved staircase with the cool wrought-iron railing he had run his hand along so many times before. He hurried up it and went to his old room. There it was, with the bed on which he had cried so often. Two chairs were piled on top of it, a box of books, and a desk. The whole pyramid was covered by sheets. He took the sheets off, put the furniture in the old places, and dusted the room with one of the sheets. In the bottom drawer of the bureau he found a silk-covered comforter packed with moth flakes. He shook it out and covered the mattress on the bed.
On the way out he glanced at his mother’s old room. The closed door looked ominous. He walked down the familiar hall, and opened it. In the corner was the empty armchair where his mother had often sat. Now it was covered by a sheet. Dead silence.
Still keeping his hand over the light to allow only a faint glow, he walked back to his own room. The smell of moth flakes was overpowering. The catch on the window opened easily, and he slid up the sash. Fresh air. Outside, the surf pounded with the old familiar roar, and a half moon was just climbing out of the sea. The wind bent the faded muslin curtains into the shape of wings.
He went downstairs to a side door, which was bolted from the inside, as it always had been, and went out, leaving it so it could be opened from the outside. He walked six blocks to a drugstore. A tall old man with bushy eyebrows stood behind the counter. Steeling himself, John whispered to him.
